Amy Gehrt: Third time still lacks the charm

Tuesday

Sep 27, 2011 at 12:01 AMSep 27, 2011 at 7:01 PM

For the third time this year the federal government found itself on the verge of a shutdown — setting the stage for yet another spending showdown that serves to prove how deep the political divide now runs.

Amy Gehrt

For the third time this year the federal government found itself on the verge of a shutdown — setting the stage for yet another spending showdown that serves to prove how deep the political divide now runs.

An agreement must be in place by Friday — the final business day before the new federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1 — in order to keep Washington running through Nov. 18. Failure to do so would force several federal agencies to cease operations; it could also mean adding to the already heavy burden many victims of natural disasters currently bear.

However, Monday brought some rare good news. The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced it was able to reclaim some unused funds from past disasters, which may allow FEMA to stretch its relief funding through Thursday or Friday — assuming no new disaster strikes before that time and there isn’t a greater-than-expected number of people who apply for emergency aid.

With the major sticking point behind them, the Senate was able to reach an agreement on stopgap spending and advance the resolution Monday night. The House is expected to sign off on the legislation as well, but with members currently on a one-week break just how lawmakers planned to get the measure on President Barack Obama's desk was unknown as of this writing.

Yet even with the funding extension all but certain now, the fact that there was even the possibility that those devastated by natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods and tornados could be victimized again — and by a man-made crisis no less — is shameful. When did lawmakers decide that playing politics was more important than the good of the people they were elected to represent? It seems like perhaps Congress needs to take a hard look at its priorities these days.

“Why should we in effect rebuild schools in Iraq on the credit card, but expect that rebuilding schools in Joplin, Missouri, at this moment in time have to be paid for in a way that has never been in any of the previous disaster assistance that we’ve put out before?” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

Governors of four East Coast states — two Democrats and two Republicans — also called on lawmakers to put political posturing aside to do the right thing. “Federal assistance for the victims of storms and floods should be beyond politics,” they said in a joint statement issued Friday.

There’s no doubt this latest standoff is further proof of how broken our political system truly is, but it is also clear the climate has gotten substantially worse in the past year. So what has changed? I can’t help but notice one glaring, divisive difference: the tea party.

Three times in the past six months or so alone, our federal government has been faced with a looming financial crisis that threatened to send our shaky economy spirally down even further. One would think such a prospect would engender a spirit of bipartisan teamwork and compromise: but, in each instance, a small group of tea party-backed conservatives in the House of Representatives instead elected to try to use the situation to advance its own polarizing, partisan agenda — effectively holding the entire nation, and its economic health, hostage.

That type of “my way or the highway” thinking is not the strong leadership America needs. It undermines confidence in the U.S. globally, resulting in weaker financial markets and a downgraded debt rating for the first time in our country’s history.

If we have any hope of navigating our way out of this economic mess and emerging as a stronger, more financially stable nation, we need to put political agendas aside and work together in a genuinely bipartisan fashion. If we don’t, there’s a very real possibility there will not be much of a country left at all — and all of the ideological differences in the world won’t matter then.

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